Dear L. B.! I received your letter and will try to fulfill your requests, although I cannot promise success for now.

The public here is almost all assembled...*

First impression (sous toutes reserves**) — most favorable. Not a trace of "affectation." We are beginning a meeting today and hope for great successes. When we finish, I will write again.

They brought a letter from Aleksinsky. I am enclosing it; after reading (and making a copy for myself) please return it without fail and without delay.

Yesterday an extraordinarily friendly letter arrived from Gorky, whose mood the arrival of the Forward supporters at *Pravda* has apparently completely "enchanted."

He writes that he and Tikhonov will take on the fiction in *Pravda*, ...that "machism and god-building and all these things have gotten bogged down forever." Splendid!

But you undertook to write a review of Steklov in vain: it will come out false...

*Prosveshchenie* they promise to bring out in mid-January.

Plekhanov wrote (through Dnevnitsky) to *Pravda*, proposing to answer Mayevsky, "if without double pric-

* The manuscript of the document is partially damaged. Here and below several words are not deciphered. Ed.

** — not vouching for what follows. Ed.